Al Gore told young green energy advocates Friday that progress on global warming must come from a strong grassroots movement that can counter the oil and coal lobbies, which he alleged have “paralyzed” governments.

Gore – who compared action on global warming to the Civil Rights movement – was the keynote speaker at Power Shift 2011, a Washington, D.C. conference attended largely by college students.

If global warming legislation is akin to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, what’s Al trying to tell us? That even his father wouldn’t have voted for Cap & Trade?

After meandering into his usual examples that “prove” anthropomorphic global warming, such as the floods and droughts that never existed until the past few decades (Noah and those who lived through the dust bowl unavailable for comment), Gore finally got to what this is all about:

He called combating climate change in the country’s economic interest, comparing unchecked emissions to the sub-prime mortgage bubble that proved so damaging.

“We have got trillions of dollars of sub-prime carbon assets whose value depends on the assumption that it is perfectly all right to put these 90 million tons of pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours,” Gore said.

Translation: Come on, sheep — every second we waste implementing our global warming policy is a million fewer dollars in my bank account!

After the speech in DC, Gore then presumably drove his Chevy Volt back to his little eco hut in California.

Related update: The UN scrubbed their “50 million global warming refugees” prediction from their website, presumably because they were freaked out by how incredibly accurate they were. The science remains settled though.